Cry come on the game of football and don't fret about St George

The last time they showed up at an international tournament England dished up dross from a Schloss in Germany, so this is the day to nail the muddled claim that Euro 2008 just 'won't be the same' without St George and his outriders.

One of our loudest boasts is that nobody loves the round-ball game as much as us, so this is our opportunity to prove it by watching and learning from a European Championship needlessly split between two sovereign lands.

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Mind you, wait until we get to Poland and Ukraine in 2012. Even the Wehrmacht struggled to connect both ends of those countries. By then, Fabio Capello might have earned £30million in a land that produced both Champions League finalists but could not dispatch a single representative from England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland to the Alpine carnival.

Somewhere in Sussex yesterday, I spotted a delivery van driver working his way through a breakfast of a packet of Doritos underneath a windscreen sticker that shouted: 'Come on England!'

Vintage 2006, or 2004, or 2002 or… What now should we cry from our cockpits, our armchairs? My answer: come on no one and everyone.

Come on the game. Come on individual artistry. Come on all the qualities that France, Italy, Portugal and Germany cultivate and which the home nations so demonstrably lack.

It's not a fatal flaw of this tournament that England bombed out before the start of the Viennese waltz, to a country of five million souls, in which several first-team regulars are partial to a fag.

It's the best reason of all to watch, even if it's through the usual Premier League lens.

Euro 2008 will double up as a vast ante-room for English talent-snatchers and it will ease the cold turkey agonies of fans who don't want to wait until August to next see Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Torres and Cesc Fabregas.

By now your correspondent would normally be in a large Football Association marquee in a forest, trying to extract quotable lines from, say, Stewart Downing or Wayne Bridge, while The Sun's bus honked its way through Vienna and, back home, a familiar tide of amnesia erased all the reasons to be cautious about England's prospects.

We won't have that this time. We in the media won't go looking for players to blurt 'this is our best chance yet' and 'there'll be no excuses this time if we don't win it'.

As a veteran of many autopsies, post-mortems and bloodlettings in tents in Japan, Lisbon and Baden- Baden - where the German hosts must surely have asked: 'How did we lose two wars to this lot?' - I'm convinced it will do English football a world of good to study the best of Europe and adjust its expectations, if that is what we do.

To find an alternative country to back makes good sport but looks like an error. There's no need to be partisan, however good, cheap and reliable that Polish plumber, however magical that Italian wedding.

Like the Brits at Wimbledon, Austria and Switzerland would not be at this championship if it were not their own garden party but after a slow first weekend the tournament erupts with Holland v Italy, Spain v Russia, Czech Republic v Portugal, Croatia v Germany and Holland v France, all bookended between Monday and Friday.

This might be the best five-day love-test ever devised. If that feast elicits only yawns then it's tribalism, not football, you really love.

Flags, allegiances, chanting, replica tops, mob-membership, nationalism, the badge on the shirt. A yawn says you have deficient interest in the game itself: the skills, technique and tactics of the world's finest teams, minus Argentina and Brazil.

The opportunity this time is to disengage the heart for once and deploy the eyes. Let's recite some names, aside from Torres and Ronaldo: Van Nistelrooy, Villa, Henry, Ballack, Huntelaar, Van Persie, Modric, Guiza and France's Karim Benzema, of whom the French journalist Xavier Rivoire writes: 'He has the right foot of Beckham, the power of Rooney and Shearer's scoring ability. It won't be long before he is being talked about as European Footballer of the Year.'

To Benzema we should add, on the scouting roster, the young Portuguese hot- shots Joao Moutinho and Miguel Veloso. Who knows? The vaunted Sweden and Inter Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic might even have a game any of us can remember.

In the self-abasement stakes, there is no need to gallop quite as far as UEFA president Michel Platini, who harumphed yesterday: 'What does England's absence mean to me? Nothing. They had only to qualify on the pitch. I do not wish to say that we miss England.

'That would mean, moreover, that the Croats are worthless. If England are not capable of finishing in the first two teams from a group of six, that is their problem.'

He is right, you know, despite the Anglophobic tone. If we watch properly now, we might find our riposte for 2010 and 2012.

RON'S FAME JUST UNREAL FOR FERGIE

Sir Alex Ferguson must have thought he could pass the finishing line without encountering a footballer whose fame he couldn't control.

But that was before Cristiano Ronaldo's love letter to Real Madrid via the Brazilian website Terra (nobody uses Basildon Bond these days), and his apparent reluctance to receive the Manchester United manager at Portugal's Euro 2008 training ground.

Ferguson's finger was on the ejector seat that dispatched David Beckham, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Roy Keane from Old Trafford. It's disconcerting to see him stripped of this awesome power.

The rational brain defends Ronaldo's right to return to Iberia. But the soul cries out against it because the loss would come with a sense of betrayal. You couldn't defend that statement in front of a judge but the heart is not a court.

DERBY REALLY IS ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR AT EPSOM

Smile-making, teeth-grating and heart-pounding are some of the claims made by one of Epsom's biggest rides, but it isn't the Derby if you make the mistake of lining up with the charlatans who cast the greatest test of a Classic thoroughbred as a dead duck.

The boast is from the funfair. As Alastair Down wrote in this week's Racing Post, there are vandals out there who think the Derby is run 'at the wrong time of year, on the wrong day of the week, over the wrong racecourse and the wrong trip'.

A must-see: the Derby

If they had their way, racing would be a procession of sprints and mile contests on perfectly flat tracks and the Epsom carnival would be stuck in a Victorian museum of hare-brained anachronisms.

I'm here to report that one's whole being still skips a pulse when the car noses over the peak of the Downs and the horseshoe obstacle course hoves into view.

There are few other natural vistas in British life that root us in 229 years of social history. But longevity isn't the best defence of Epsom's charms. The real point is that the Derby is the supreme test of equine agility and mental fibre.

The undulations and cambers are not some regrettable defect of the world's most evocative Flat race. They are the essence of the test itself.

Shorten it from a mile and a half to 10 furlongs or a mile and you might as well play the Wimbledon finals on concrete. Cricket isn't the only sport assailed by the Twenty20 mindset. As the international calendar throws up new challenges to the Derby's primacy, the Lotharios of the covering sheds are fetching far bigger fees if they excel at eight furlongs than those who win big middle-distance prizes.

Vanished are the days when trainers sleep-walked their best animals on to the Surrey Downs in June. Nowadays alternative targets abound.

But none can match the crack of the starting stalls at 4pm today, the steep climb past the trees and the Alton Towers roll round Tattenham Corner before the balance-test of the stretch. Mistrust anyone who calls the Derby a Dodo.

'Beckham No 1 pick in baseball draft' yelped an American headline yesterday. You wouldn't put it past him, would you? Relax: it refers to high school short-stopTim Beckham, snapped up by the Tampa Bay Rays.

Roy Keane's metamorphosis from doomsday warrior to statesman — Chapter 10. Who else should pop up on the All Blacks’ training field this week than Keano himself, on a fact-finding mission to poke the soul of New Zealand rugby? Only one problem.

Roy’s career is one long war against choking, a crusade against the hollow reputation. So when he professes a life-long love for the All Black aura, he is kindly ignoring the World Cups of 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007 — the five Kiwibellyflops from the six tournaments so far.

Graham Henry’s men have more to learn from Keane than he does from them.